1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the reaction of ultra-high temperature steady-state plasmas such as the freely floating plasma filament of Kapitza by means of which temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Kelvin have been attained and which produce measureable fluxes of thermonuclear neutrons and measureable outputs of fusion energy but which have no great practical utility unless improvements can be discovered or invented to enable an increase of the plasma temperature by at least an order of magnitude.
2. Prior Art
One approach to the creation of such plasmas is called that of the "laser spark" and may be found at length in the books of Bekefi, Hughes and Ready which are listed below at the end of the section on parameters of a complete operative embodiment. The work closest to that of the present disclosure is that of Raizer detailed in his book Laser-Induced Discharge Phenomena, Consultants Bureau, New York, 1977 (translated from Russian original of Nauka Press, Moscow, 1974), particularly the material dealing with Raizer's optical plasmotron.
A physically similar approach, using however microwaves instead of laser light, is that of Kapitza detailed in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Lecture (Science, vol. 205, Sept. 7, 1979, pp. 959-964, originally presented in Sweden, Dec. 8, 1978, and based principally upon papers published in Russian by Kapitza in 1969, 1970, and 1975 which are referenced therein). Among other things Kapitza recounts the theoretically and experimentally well-established fact that a deuterium-fueled fusion reactor would solve the world's impending energy-shortage crisis and that such a reactor would become feasible if the temperature of his plasmas could be increased by a factor of about twenty to about a billion degrees Kelvin.
Despite the potential practical importance of progress in this field, it has not been obvious how to extrapolate the results of Raizer and Kapitza by an order of magnitude to what shall be called herein the regime of ultra-high temperatures (in excess of five hundred million degrees Kelvin). Despite a decade of research at the Laboratory of which he is Director, Kapitza in December 1978 opined that further progress in this direction appears to be impossible without the introduction of two new complications (a strong magnetic field, and increase of plasma size from centimeters to meters) which decrease the feasibility of this approach to the point where expert opinion may regard it as a blind alley with no further progress possible; to quote Kapitza:" still we have some unresolved difficulties that . . . may make the whole problem insoluble . . . our thermonuclear reactor is simple . . . but practical means of its realization and size depend on . . . processes that cannot be treated on a theoretical basis alone . . . . The . . . work . . . leads to problems, the solutions of which cannot be foreseen . . . ."
Despite the pessimism of prevailing expert opinion regarding the present approach, the disclosure of the present invention shows precisely how, with great quantitative exactness, utilization of relatively inexpensive commercially available lasers and microwave generators in a straightforward manner according to the principles disclosed herein permits the production of a steady state deuterium plasma of diameter less than one centimeter and temperature exceeding 1.5 billion degrees Kelvin in a room-temperature gaseous environment at 21 atmospheres pressure.
It is well established in patent law that the failure of an inventor or discoverer to comprehend a correct scientific explanation of his invention is no bar to patentability nor to citation of his results as fully anticipatory prior art barring patentability by others. However the position of the present inventor is that, despite its admitted importance, the work of Raizer and Kapitza and related investigators is so flawed by serious failures of correct scientific interpetation of their empirical discoveries that (in the vocabulary of patent law) their publications fail to teach others how to make or use their phenomena under even slightly altered conditions, such as, for example, an extrapolation in temperature by a mere single order of magnitude, and therefore, without the presently disclosed nonobvious inventive improvements of their discoveries, their publications would never have led those of ordinary skill in the relevant arts to attainment of the presently disclosed useful accomplishments.
In fact, Raizer's publications would lead the artisan to believe that such plasmas are not even contained, but consist of continually escaping ions and electrons which are continually replaced by the ionization of new inflowing atoms. Consequently the researcher interested in high-temperature plasma confinement would have no reason to pursue Raizer's approach.
Similarly, Kapitza's initial publications denied that actual plasma confinement was taking place; he claimed that only the electrons were being confined (by a postulated double electric layer in the plasma boundary) and that the ions were continually being lost into the plasma boundary and then replaced by new ions from outside, as in Raizer's conception; in Kapitza's major publication on the theory of his phenomenon, what he postulates as a "double layer" is actually only half of a genuine double layer such as that disclosed in FIGS. 2 and 3 of the present disclosure; more specifically, Kapitza has postulated only the potential hill in FIG. 3 and not the acompanying potential valley, despite the known fact that the solution displayed in FIG. 3 corresponds to the completely rigorous exact solution of the Poisson-Boltzmann equations of plasma kinetic theory known to all plasma physicists as BGK waves after their discoverers Bernstein, Greene and Kruskal (see pages 72-88 of R. C. Davidson's book Methods in Nonlinear Plasma Theory, Academic Press, 1972; using the terminology that a migma is an electrically neutral collection of ions and electrons in ordered motion while in a plasma the particles are in random motion, see also the anticipation in the context of migmas rather than plasmas of P. T. Farnsworth in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,258,402 dated June 28, 1966 and 3,386,883 dated June 4, 1968).
In his 1970 paper, Kapitza relies so heavily upon his only partially correct theory of the boundary layer that he ignores, as experimental errors or anomalies, three perfectly valid experimental evidences that his ions were at the same temperature as his electrons (namely, that fusion neutrons at the correct rate were observed, that spectroscopic evidence indicated high ion temperatures, as did the 20 kW bremmstrahlung loss appropriate to a plasma but mistakenly attributed by Kapitza to an ad hoc hypothesized "anomalous skin conductivity loss"), and concludes that while his electrons were clearly at a temperature of one million degrees Kelvin or more, his ions were cooler by a full order of magnitude. In the ensuing decade, the weight of experimental evidence has forced him to accept that some of the ions, allegedly only those in the "interior" of the plasma, far from the boundary layer, are somehow being confined by some unknown mechanism, but as recently as September, 1979 he did not accept that the ions were sufficiently well confined to reach thermal equilibrium with the electrons: "Now we can maintain . . . a . . . discharge at a pressure of 25 atmospheres and continuously maintain the electrons at a temperature of 50 million kelvins . . . we have permanently an electron gas with a record high temperature . . . . The main problem is to heat the ions to the same temperature . . . " (loc. cit. p. 963).
Consequently there can be no doubt that the researcher interested in ultrahigh-temperature plasma confinement would have no reason to pursue Kapitza's approach in unmodified form but would, like Kapitza himself, conclude that some other complications (such as a strong magnetic field) would have to be introduced before Kapitza's phenomenon could be extrapolated to ultra-high temperatures.
Accordingly, neither the publications of Raizer nor Kapitza constitute genuinely anticipatory prior art regarding the subject matter of the presently disclosed invention. In fact, the presently disclosed invention comprises a combination of known techniques to produce an unexpected result (at least, unexpected in terms of expert opinion, although the present art is known to be highly predictable when theoretical models are sufficiently complete and are used with rigor, as in the detailed proof below by means of accepted principles of theoretical physics and engineering that the presently disclosed invention is perfectly operable and can be designed to operate within a few percentage points of nominal operating parameter values).